With re-election due to be held today, a security blanket has covered the Jessore 5 constituency where voting had to be suspended in as many as 60 polling centres on election day, January 5, because of violence allegedly by Jamaat-e-Islami and its key ally BNP.
During the national poll, authorities were forced to cancel voting in almost half of the total 122 polling centres in Monirampur, where Jamaat had been staging massive violence since its war criminal leader Delwar Hossain Sayedee was sentenced to death on February 28 last year.
According to the district’s Returning Officer Mustafizur Rahman, each centre will be guarded by 15 armed policemen and 10 members of Border Guard Bangladesh. The streets would also be patrolled by 500 police personnel, 600 BGB, 150 members of Rapid Action Battalion and 350 army men during the voting hours between 8am and 4pm.
A mobile court led by a magistrate will also be patrolling each of the 26 zones the electoral area has been divided into.
Starting from the early hours of January 5, the 10th national election saw massive violence in the area as Jamaat-Shibir-BNP men bombed polling centres, attacked election officials, law enforcers, snatched voting equipments and torched polling centres.
On that day, the deployment of only two armed policemen and a single member of Ansar at each of the polling centres identified as “important” by the Election Commission – proved to be inadequate, as in some cases army had to intervene to rescue election officials being attacked by opposition activists. The chaos left one killed from police firing and over 50 election officials injured.
The situation appears to have calmed down significantly as joint forces cracked down on miscreants behind the violence and have so far arrested about 300 Jamaat-Shibir-BNP men, including Jessore BNP President Iqbal Hossain and three union parishad chairmen.
Jessore has been under media spotlight since the election day as a spate of violence on minority people followed the voting, further displaying the dominance of the opposition in many of its areas.
There are speculations about a possible low turnout of the 50,000 voters from minority communities who live in the 249 villages of Monirampur. Concerns have grown stronger with the latest incident of repression taking place in the district’s Hazrail village’s Hrishipara on the early hours of January 8.
On January 31 last year, a policeman was killed in an attack allegedly by Jamaat during a countrywide shutdown; while on March 22, a brick field worker was killed and about 50 people were injured when Jamaat-Shibir tried to prevent police from arresting a local Jamaat leader from Monirampur’s Joypur.
The incident gave rise to an inter-party clash in which AL leaders were attacked, their houses looted and burnt.
Monirampur police station’s Officer-in-Charge Mir Rezzaul Hossain told the Dhaka Tribune that they were all set to ensure a peaceful election and the security forces would stay in the area at least until January 18 to prevent any post-election violence.
